A “Call to Arms”
The following is a transcript of the national address given by CEC National Secretary Craig Isherwood, 25th October 2008
We are in a period of history where today, our country and the world are in a frightening, existential crisis which none of us have experienced before.
We are on the verge of plunging into a New Dark Age far worse even than that of the Black Death of the14th Century.
If this crisis is not solved, now, the world’s population will plunge within a generation from 6.5 billion people to below 1 billion, and the survivors will live in unprecedented misery.
The present global financial system is exploding because it is built upon British free-trade and globalisation, in which the City of London, Wall St., and other financial elites loot the actual physical economy for their own private profit. Therefore, the debt bubble soars, while the real economy collapses.
Although we had problems before, beginning in 1983 Hawke and Keating rammed this free trade/globalist model through in Australia, and our actual physical economy has been looted ever since, including by Howard and now by Rudd. Poverty, job losses, home foreclosures and homelessness are all soaring, while our food producers, small businesses and manufacturers disappear by the day, as the economy collapses.
The intent of free trade and globalisation is to wipe out sovereign nation states, so that a private financial oligarchy can rule.
Today, Prime Minister Rudd and Opposition Leader and merchant banker Turnbull are engaged in a virtually criminal bipartisan pact to bail out the private banking system in our country at the expense of the people.
Their motto is: “Bankers First!”
They are taking their lead from Britain’s Gordon Brown, who is advised by the man who, more than anyone else, created this collapsing global speculative bubble—former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and by Malcolm Turnbull’s former Goldman Sachs business partner on Wall Street, Henry Paulson, today the U.S. Treasury Secretary.
Rudd and Turnbull have demonstrated that they intend to commit Australia’s national financial resources to prop up the trillions of dollars of financial derivatives held by the private banking system, and to let the people suffer or die.
They have refused to take up my party’s proposed Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill, to save the people and put the banks through bankruptcy reorganization, because they are owned by the private bankers.
Under their leadership, we face a mortal threat, today, far worse than at any time in our 200-year history, including the imminent threat of Japanese invasion during WWII.
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the great U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, and the world war spread with full force into the Pacific.
Later that same month, our greatest Prime Minister John Curtin, who had only been in office two months, made a command decision that saved our country.
Curtin did what no Australian leader had had the courage to do before: He broke, decisively, with Britain and its Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Correctly convinced that the British had already conceded Australia to the Japanese, he announced on December 27, 1941, “I make it clear that Australia looks to America, free from any pangs about our traditional links of friendship to Britain...”
Of course, he was looking to the America of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and General Douglas Macarthur, not to those whom FDR called the “economic royalists” of Wall St., the ones who had financed Hitler in the 1930s, and who have run America for most of the post-war period.
John Curtin’s action, his decision at that crucial time saved our country.
This week I call on federal parliamentarians to show the kind courage which Curtin did, to dump Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, and to immediately shift Australia to economic policies in the national interest, including the adoption of the American statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche’s longstanding, FDR-modeled proposal for a New Bretton Woods agreement for a world financial reorganization, to ensure our survival.
Australia needs the ALP to turn to leaders with the national banking, protectionist outlook of its great past figures like John Curtin and Ben Chifley, and a Coalition leader to emerge with the outlook of the patriotic, pro-industry, pro-agriculture longtime National Party leader and Federal minister, “Black Jack” McEwen.
Such patriotic leadership could then work with myself and the CEC, who know precisely what to do, and Australia could join other great nations like Russia, China, India, France and many others which are ready to adopt LaRouche’s New Bretton Woods.
Before their untimely deaths several years ago, myself and the CEC were privileged to work with two of the true stalwarts of “old Labor”, Clyde Cameron and Jim Cairns, both of whom had wholeheartedly, publicly endorsed LaRouche’s proposal for a New Bretton Woods.
They had both been Federal ministers in the Whitlam government, when that government planned to “buy back the farm” in order to develop our great country, and was therefore sacked by the Crown. They knew what British imperialism was, and they knew its local flunkeys, what Jim Cairns told us they used to call “the hegemony”, and they fought it till the end.
This year represents the 20th anniversary of the Citizens Electoral Council.
For almost all of those 20 years, we have been proudly associated with Lyndon LaRouche and have issued his and our own warnings and forecasts of the global financial catastrophe we are now living through.
Over these past 20 years, and even longer, you have been repeatedly lied to by politicians, economists, and the media that we, here in Australia, will have everlasting eternal prosperity and wealth.
The latest round of lies comes from Kevin Rudd, that the “crisis has been unfolding for a mere 15 months”, and from Turnbull, that “It all started with the housing bubble in the United states.” They claim that “no-one saw this crisis coming.”
But how come my party, the CEC, forecast it already in the early 1990s, and issued this book back in August 2001 with the title: What Australia Must Do to Survive the Depression?”
In this book, and with updates since, we precisely outlined the solution: the creation of a New Bretton Woods international monetary system based on national banking, fixed exchange rates, tariff protection, and great infrastructure projects, as Lyndon LaRouche had long proposed.
Already back in 1994, LaRouche’s warnings of the essential characteristic of this crisis were well known in Australia . For instance, the CEC and LaRouche were featured in a 20 page supplement in Australian Financial Review devoted to the subject of financial derivatives. Under the sub-head “Bad press overseas has been adding to the global push for regulation” the AFR reported: “We are, according to the American Polemicist, Lyndon H LaRouche, Jnr, facing a derivatives bubble, a threat of enormous magnitude...The bubble grows like a cancer at the expense of its host, at the same time that its appetite is growing, while the means of satisfying its appetite are collapsing...”
That bubble is now measured in the quadrillions of dollars, while the entire world’s GDP is a mere $50 trillion.
LaRouche was right then, 14 years ago, and he is right now!
Rudd and Turnbull claim that the Australian banking system is “in pretty good shape”.
But given that, thanks to globalization and free trade, Australia is intimately tied to the exploding global financial system, how could our banks conceivably be in “good shape”?
Currently, our Australian banks have total assets of $2.3 trillion, which are often of dubious quality. As opposed to that they have $13 trillion in derivatives. So, they are utterly bankrupt, no matter how much Rudd and others loot from the population to try and bail them out, or how many television appearances Rudd makes to assure the population. Most of you get the smell that he is lying, anyway, and that’s why he was terrified that a run on the banks might break out at any moment.
In a desperate, fruitless attempt to save themselves. our banks have been grabbing as much money as they can. Since the beginning of the year, they have quadrupled their borrowings from overseas; the Reserve Bank has poured in tens of billions; and Rudd has given them at least $35 billion of the $64 billion Future Fund, created from the sale of Telstra.
So, enough of the lies!
Here is what we have to do.
Firstly, dump Rudd and Turnbull.
Secondly, get the Federal parliament to enact our Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill.
Our financial and monetary problems are actually political problems, first, and foremost.
Money, finance and banking are tools of sovereign governments to provide for the general welfare of the people they are elected from to govern. Therefore when a government chooses to act under the right leadership, then the money supply, financial system and banks can be forced to behave as they should—as tools for the people under regulation by sovereign governments.
Not the other way round, as they do now: The government acting as a tool for the banks.
Under the Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill, firstly the Government would put the Banks under bankruptcy re-organization.
There would be no bail out of the banks gambling debts, and we would nationalize them if the government had to, but the government would preserve the banking system so we have the means to run the economy.
Once in bankruptcy reorganization, we get rid of the illegitimate debt.
As far as the derivatives are concerned—you cancel them. They can never be paid, so they have to be cancelled.
The hedge funds will scream—but they are gone now anyway, as the global derivative bubble implodes.
This will then leave the other parts of the banking system to be reorganized. Overall, we will run the banking system in a highly regulated way, very much like Curtin and Chifley did during World War II, where credit was directed to where it was needed for the Common Good, and the present crisis is far greater than what they faced.
Thirdly, the government would slap a moratorium on all home and family farm foreclosures.
We must keep families in their homes, no matter what! Under the current collapse conditions up to a million home owners are going to be either mortgage stressed or evicted within the next 3 months.
The family or household unit represents directly, the potential to develop the future prosperity of our country. Shatter the family unit through homelessness and stress and you will unleash unimaginable social chaos.
So the principle is that whilst we reorganize the banking system, we must keep people in their homes.
Homeowners can pay “rental rates” to their mortgage holders for however long it takes to stabilize the entire economy—this cash flow to the mortgage holders will help to re-capitalize the banks.
But no more foreclosures!
Fourthly, we must re-establish a government owned national bank as prescribed under LaRouche’s New Bretton Woods system.
In Australia, that means we have to nationalise the Reserve Bank, to effectively create a national bank like King O’Malley’s original conception of the Commonwealth Bank.
We provide ready-to-enact legislation for this in our What Australia Must Do to Survive the Depression book.
That National Bank has to then issue credit at 1-2% for massive infrastructure projects, such as the 17 great national water projects, and nuclear power and transport projects elaborated in our February 2002 New Citizen special report, ‘The Infrastructure Road to Recovery”.
Such projects will ensure millions of productive well paid jobs for all Australians.
Finally, despite us all being under some very dark clouds at present, with very frightening events unfolding every day we are also at a decisive point in history, where the crisis gives us a chance to profoundly change our future for the better.
As for the path which we must tread to get there, I want to leave you with these words from John Curtin, which he wrote as a credo of his own political outlook:
“Let you highest ideal be what Christ showed most—an infinite pity for the people and a hatred of injustice. Enthrone this ideal in your hearts and you will find your work. Your voice, perhaps your pen, will smite injustice and tyranny; your truest prayers will be ardent work for others and that trembling, cowardly, introspective gazing into your own soul to find out whether you are the Lord’s or whether you are not, will give place to a brave endeavour and a noble and constant self-sacrifice which shall consume your being with enthusiasm and make life really worth living”
There is no other mass-based political movement in this country besides my party, the CEC, which has either the vaguest clue as to what must be done to save Australia, or, if they did, would have the courage to act ruthlessly for the Common Good, against the City of London/Wall St. financial oligarchy. But I know exactly what must be done, and am willing to fight for it at all costs, because we must. I am therefore today asking you, my fellow Australians, to join myself and the CEC in this noble endeavour. Your own life, the lives of your children, and the lives of generations of Australians to come, will depend on what you now do.
Thank you.
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